The new issue also includes Book and Media Reviews (of The Stress of Combat, the Combat of Stress: Changing Strategies towards Ex-Service Men and Women and Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture) as well as Disability Studies Dissertation Abstracts.

Title: Gases, Liquids and Solids: Reclaiming Fluidity in a Liquid Modern World

Abstract: Much academic focus has led to the understanding of the commodification of the body, which has resulted amongst other things in the devotion of time, money and effort, to pursue the ‘perfect’ body. This commitment to an idealised/normalised asceticism is often manifested in the actual or appeared alteration of the size and shape of the body with the ‘help’ of various diets, clothing, surgery, drugs and exercise. One’s corporeality therefore partially shapes social reality and statuses according to the degree to which bodies are accepted into society. Despite the importance placed on the body in terms of appearance and productivity in the contemporary world, mundane functions of the body are often deemed shameful in this fallacious imaginary of the body resulting in the denial and/or veiling of regular bodily functions. Repulsion and exclusion can be felt by those possessing ‘leaky’ bodies or more accurately bodies that leak without control. This paper utilises a Baumanesque analysis of modernity to highlight the convenience of a controlled body to a consumerist society. Also reflective of Shildrick’s (2009) plea for troubling dominant discourses and instead envisaging all bodies as non-stable, Bauman’s work creates the potential to imagine an emancipated society where static, constricting notions of the body are obsolete. Through the location of society as liquid modern (Bauman, 2000), the common sense notion of ‘bodily control’ will be interrogated and highlighted as a dangerous benchmark that people are best to resist.

Venue: Room 10212 in the Arundel Building, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University (More information on the venue can be found here.) ***Please note the change to our usual room***

Join us for:

Everything about us without us: the struggle of disability activists for Independent Living in Iceland

Embla Ágústsdóttir, chairwoman of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), embla@npa.is

&

Freyja Haraldsdóttir, directress, of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), freyja@npa.is

Chair: Jenny Slater

Abstract: Iceland is one of the countries that lacks policy and practice for personal assistance and independent living for disabled people. A user-led cooperative on personal assistance was founded by 33 disabled citizens in Iceland in 2010, who have since been fighting for the recognition of personal assistance as a way in providing services.

The government decided in the beginning of 2011 to start a three-year pilot project following the transference of services for disabled people from the state to the municipalities. This pilot project has been delayed but is in its first stages and will be ongoing until the end of year 2014 when personal assistance is supposed to become a legal right.

In this presentation we want to shed some light on the struggle for independent living in Iceland. We want to share our experience on how this process has developed from the viewpoint of disability activists and how we have experienced the need to fight for our involvement and having a voice, even when it comes to working with disability organizations and the academia.

This paper examines the relationship between disability and beauty as a central preoccupation of Toni Morrison’s fictional writing, her critical discourse and her most recent work as a curator. I am interested in how Morrison’s critical writing about race and identity intersects with shifting notions of beauty in her fiction, but also, in turn, how these ideas can provide a conceptual framework for writing about literature and disability in general.

Dr Alice Hall holds an MPhil in Criticism and Culture and a PhD in twentieth century literature from the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She recently completed a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Nottingham and is the author of Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature published by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2011. She currently teaches at Université Paris Diderot and is working on her second book. She has taught widely on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, including topics such as Modernism, the body, short stories and the novel.

For further information from the organisers, please contact: Dr. David Bolt: boltd@hope.ac.uk

Title: Celebrating Crip Pleasure: The Somatechnics of Disability and Desire

Abstract: In this presentation, I intend to address pleasure and desire in the disabled body in relation to somatechnics in which embodiment is always technologised. The focus will primarily be on sexuality, but also on other bodily engagements.

As one aspect of biotechnology, prostheses have long been in term use as compensatory technologies that stand in for some putative lack or deficiency that is supposedly the mark of anomalous embodiment. More recently, however, the emphasis has firmly switched to enhancement and supplement, and it is that more productive trajectory that I shall pursue. My argument is that in the era of postmodernity, the disabled body specifically can raise acute questions about the always ambivalent relationship between embodied subjects, pleasure and biotechnology. Desire is no longer focussed on the replication of a more or less acceptable model of normative practices but on a highly productive alternative that inevitably queers the meaning of sexuality itself.

For Further Details on the conference, including registration – please click here

The final DRF seminar of the 2011-12 academic year is scheduled for tomorrow (3rd May 2012) and we are pleased to announce that there will be an encore.

Date/Time: Fri. 25th May 2012 (Friday) 1.00pm – 2.30pm

Venue: Room 10212 in the Arundel Building, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University (More information on the venue can be found here.) Please note the change to our usual room.

Join us for:

Everything about us without us: the struggle of disability activists for Independent Living in Iceland

Embla Ágústsdóttir, chairwoman of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), embla@npa.is

&

Freyja Haraldsdóttir, directress, of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), freyja@npa.is

Iceland is one of the countries that lacks policy and practice for personal assistance and independent living for disabled people. A user-led cooperative on personal assistance was founded by 33 disabled citizens in Iceland in 2010, who have since been fighting for the recognition of personal assistance as a way in providing services.

The government decided in the beginning of 2011 to start a three-year pilot project following the transference of services for disabled people from the state to the municipalities. This pilot project has been delayed but is in its first stages and will be ongoing until the end of year 2014 when personal assistance is supposed to become a legal right.

In this presentation we want to shed some light on the struggle for independent living in Iceland. We want to share our experience on how this process has developed from the viewpoint of disability activists and how we have experienced the need to fight for our involvement and having a voice, even when it comes to working with disability organizations and the academia.